Freud’s Birthday – he had a really good insight

Psychotherapy still booming 150 years after Freud’s birth:

‘Freud once called psychotherapy a secular kind of pastoral care,’ said the WCP president. In a time when religion doesn’t have the same importance as before, people look to therapists to help them find meaning.

Freud’s fundamental contribution to the development of treatment methods is little disputed today, despite rival schools of thought.

Eric Kandel, American neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner for his research into memory, calls the ‘father of psychoanalysis’ a ‘giant’ and the greatest research scientist of the 20th century.

This all makes good sense. Somewhere, usually well hidden, inside us, are other autonomous entities & intelligences that influence our lives. That was Freud’s main insight and it is hard to imagine a world where that was not seen as an ordianry fact of life. I’m still reading When Nietzsche Wept and the whole story is set at the time of the birth of that insight. In this WCP (World Council of Psychotherapy) item they call Freud a great researcher.  Right.  To research something so unlike the material world is a daring & tricky thing, but it is research – Freud thought of every analysis as a form of research.  (Where is a reference to that in his writing?)